Jenny Kim > Jenny's Quotes

“Sometimes you can’t let go of the past without facing it again.”
― Gail Tsukiyama, The Samurai's Garden

“Mothers and their children are in a category all their own. There's no bond so strong in the entire world. No love so instantaneous and forgiving.”
― Gail Tsukiyama, Dreaming Water

“Even a snail will eventually reach its destination.”
― Gail Tsukiyama, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms

“Life does often get in the way of one's reading.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“You are a wise man, Major, and I will consider your advice with great care—and humility." He finished his tea and rose from the table to go to his room. "But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable woman?"

"My dear boy," said the Major. "Is there really any other kind?”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“It surprised him that his grief was sharper than in the past few days. He had forgotten that grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child's math book. Instead, it was almost as if his body contained a big pile of garden rubbish full both of heavy lumps of dirt and of sharp thorny brush that would stab him when he least expected it.”
― Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

“When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― Isabel Allende

“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”
― Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts

“A love gone bad, a sea of bitterness: such an everyday thing. As ordinary as the tide, and perhaps as relentless. But tides turned, too.”
― Deanna Fei, A Thread of Sky

“Here it was like wind or rain, a sign of the seasons, just part of the weather-- another element of this country that took hold of her, even as it eluded her grasp”
― Deanna Fei, A Thread of Sky

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.

My business is to tear them apart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Elected fifth president of the United States, Monroe transformed a fragile little nation - "a savage wilderness," as Edmund Burke put it - into "a glorious empire." Although George Washington had won the nation's independence, he bequeathed a relatively small country, rent by political factions, beset by foreign enemies, populated by a largely unskilled, unpropertied people, and ruled by oligarchs who controlled most of the nation's land and wealth. Washington's three successors - John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison - were mere caretaker presidents who left the nation bankrupt, its people deeply divided, its borders under attack, its capital city in ashes.”
― Harlow Giles Unger, The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness